This volume explores the potential role of virtual models for scientific research on historic palaces. The rise of digital surveying and modelling techniques has revolutionized the ways in which historic buildings such as court residences can be studied. These new techniques offer unprecedented opportunities for architectural historians but also lead to new challenges.

One challenge is the reliability and verifiability of the data that is used to make digital models, whether surveys of extant buildings or reconstructions of lost buildings. Another is the use of virtual palaces as research instruments in their own right – not just to communicate results to the wider public, but as genuine research tools that help visualize and clarify hypotheses about issues such as construction phases or the spaces’ ceremonial use.

The papers in this volume offer multidisciplinary case studies that focus on the surveying, recording, digitizing and modelling of extant palaces in their present state. They also look at the possible uses of the resulting digital models as instruments for further research and as vehicles for the preservation and propagation of knowledge.

The five papers collected in this volume were first presented at the PALATIUM workshop Virtual Palaces, Part I held in Leuven in November 2011.